A friend wondered what feeling her fear was supposed to do for her. She said that what she usually did whenever fearful pictures arose in her mind, which was often, was to suppress the feelings that came with the pictures.
Acknowledging, accepting, feeling and expressing fear in wordless sound or body movement is often extremely uncomfortable, especially at first. Expressing fear safely and with as much acceptance as you can give it actually relieves the pressured feeling inside that any growing, internalized fear bubbling to the surface gives us. That’s what expressing the fear can do for you.
Most people don’t even recognize that emotions are a part of the self, and a part that needs healing because of routine, lifetimes-long denial patterns. We can’t successfully cut off parts of ourselves, but that’s what we are attempting when we suppress. Emotions are a part of ourselves, and fear only feels bad because we have denied it for so long. Anything that gets routinely denied feels dark, monstrous, alien, and scary. Fear doesn’t feel nearly as bad to me as it used to because I don’t deny it nearly as much as I used to.
Before you feel it, the fear feels like a dragon in the closet; as you go into it and come out the other side, the dragon shrinks away, perhaps to a salamander. The judgment that comes up for everybody who considers expressing fear for the first time or first few times is, “If I dare feel or express this fear, what I’m afraid of will manifest”. My experience is that the opposite occurs – if I dare to release the fear by allowing its expression it doesn’t need to draw a reflection of itself in order to trigger it. It’s the denial of fear while focusing on mental pictures that attracts what we fear. Often if I can release the fear ahead of any event, the event either doesn’t happen or manifests much more benignly than I’d originally feared. In this context, “nothing to fear but the denial of fear itself” would be an accurate coining of the old maxim.
Worry is a more sublimated form of fear. It’s the tip of the iceberg of a terror held in the subconscious parts of our being. The continuum looks like this: worry->anxiety->fear->terror. They’re all forms of the same emotion, depending on how much of it is consciously felt in a given area. Fear is an emotion, but is not universally understood, recognized or acknowledged as an emotion, like anger or grief is.
Fear can be expressed in several ways; allowing the energy of it into your jaw to make your teeth chatter, allowing spontaneous weird sounds to emerge, or by crying. Private or safe space is best for emotional expression. Expressing fear means giving in to it, allowing it up into the throat, into the voice, and then abandoning control and letting it happen. I nearly always feel better after I release, with more understanding of the triggering situation than before I started. This understanding doesn’t always come immediately, or on the same day, but it does come.
I grew up hearing the phrase, “the less you do, the less you want to do”. It applies here; the less you are in touch with your emotions, the less you want to be. It takes a conscious willingness and intentional effort to go there. Like anything else, it gets easier the more you practice.